TV Highlights

Playwright, Screenwriter, Actor

About This Person

From All Movie Guide: Completing her education at Vassar, American screenwriter Frances Goodrich began her career as an actress, first appearing on Broadway in 1916. Her stage career was slightly more successful than her marital experiences; by 1929 she had been divorced twice, first from actor Robert Ames, then from historian Henrik Willem Van Loon (the author of The Story of Mankind). Thus she was not predisposed to romantic entanglements when, in the late 1920s, she met fellow actor Albert Hackett; moreover, he was to her a "fresh kid" (he was nine years her junior). As it happened, both Goodrich and Hackett shared a mutual goal: to leave acting behind in favor of playwrighting. The two were married while collaborating on their first Broadway hit, Up Pops the Devil (1929).